Law & Disorder —

Publishers try to railroad Open Access research

As Congress considers this year's version of a bill designed to ensure public …

The past several years have seen a number of initiatives intended to leverage the Internet to provide greater access to scientific literature. One such effort comes from the National Institutes of Health, which has encouraged researchers to place copies of their published works at PubMed Central, and has worked with publishers to facilitate this process while avoiding copyright issues. Given the slow progress of PubMed Central, Congress has recently expressed interest in making this process mandatory. This has raised red flags with a number of publishing concerns, but the tactics used by the publishers to block such bills are raising enough ethical issues that they may create a backlash.

Congressional action on the matter is based on the simple logic that the results of publicly funded research should be accessible by the public that's paid for it. A bill, the Federal Research Public Access Act, was introduced in 2006 with the intention of ensuring this access. It would expand the scope beyond the biological research funded by the NIH to include any federal agency that funds over $100 million in research. Journals could continue to attract subscriptions by retaining exclusive access to content for six months following publication; the bill places the burden of hosting the material on the agency supplying the funding. It also specifically excludes material that has not been subject to peer review. Overall, it appears to strike a reasonable balance among a number of competing needs.

Many publishers, however, did not view these requirements as reasonable. Back in January, Nature broke the news that the Association of American Publishers (AAP) had hired an aggressive public relations consultant to keep this bill and any future versions of it from ever becoming laws. Best known for having led Exxon-Mobil's attacks on Greenpeace, the consultant recommended a course of action that framed the measure as an attack on peer review itself and the government hosting of content as an invitation to government censorship.

Peter Suber, who tracks open access news, notes an article (subscription) in the Chronicle of Higher Education that indicates the publishers have put some of these ideas into action by funding an organization called PRISM, the Partnership for Research Integrity in Science & Medicine. The site, which has stock photos of serious people in lab coats (meant to suggest the involvement of the research community), implements a number of the PR suggestions originally reported in Nature. These include the suggestions that the effort is an attack on peer review itself and that government-sponsored hosting is an invitation to censorship and manipulation.

These hyperbolic claims, however, may be prompting a lot of discomfort among the scientific publishing community, which contains a number of small academic presses in addition to the large commercial houses. The accurate information provided to Nature suggested that not everyone was happy with the initial ideas. With PRISM now live, Suber has published an open letter from the executive director of the Rockefeller University Press in which the AAP is asked to add a disclaimer to the PRISM web site. The letter indicates that the views expressed at PRISM do not reflect those of all AAP members, and lists five ways in which the site spins or distorts the truth.

In short, if PRISM is any indication, the commercial publishers have overplayed their hand. By grossly distorting the intent and likely result of potential Congressional action, they have both discredited any reasonable arguments they had and alienated some of those who might otherwise be their allies. That said, Congress has been known to act based on discredited arguments in the past, so the publishers' effort might succeed despite its shortcomings.